Security in P2P networks: Survey and research directions

Abstract

A fundamental feature of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks is the honest collaboration among an heterogeneous community of participants. After Napster success -the first P2P file sharing application massively used-, advances in this area have been intense, with the proposal of many new architectures and applications for content and computing sharing, and collaborative working environments. However, the inherent differences between the P2P model and the classic client-server paradigm cause that many security solutions developed for the latter are not applicable or, in the best case, have to be carefully adapted. In this paper, we present a survey on security issues in P2P networks, providing a comparative analysis of existing solutions and identifying directions for future research. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2006.